Rum's $13.7bn lease comes with a penny-stock kicker

Rum Group has signed a capacity lease worth up to $13.7bn at its Maysville, Georgia data center campus with a customer the SEC filing identifies only as a US-based third-party cloud provider, according to Data Center Dynamics. The six-year contract covers GPUs and GPU services at the site across three tranches, the last contingent on the customer approving the delivery schedule—and the equity attached to that schedule is the filing's most telling feature.

The option covers up to 50.81 million shares of Rum's Class A common stock at $0.01 per share, vesting gradually as purchases scale. At that strike price, the warrants read as a profit-sharing arrangement written in shares: the more capacity the tenant takes, the larger its stake becomes, and for a company with a net loss and a campus still under development, that is a significant part of the economics.

Rum, the company formerly known as Rumble, closed its purchase of 85 percent of Germany's Northern Data in June 2026, picking up a European footprint and a cloud business now renamed Quake AI, the platform that hosts Truth Social. The Maysville campus was originally Northern Data's project, announced in December 2024 with 120MW of capacity and room to expand to 180MW, and with operations targeted for the first quarter of 2027.

The site is still under development, which makes the tranche structure the real term sheet: the customer is committing to the first tranches and holding an option on the rest, with the third tied to its own sign-off on the delivery schedule rather than a $13.7bn promise today. Construction and delivery risk stay with Rum, and the customer's compensation for taking the step-up risk is the option on 50.81 million shares.

Developers with a named hyperscaler on the lease can borrow at infrastructure pricing and skip the equity kicker; Rum, with an unnamed tenant and a campus that has yet to produce a megawatt, is issuing a call option on its own stock as the cost of getting the contract signed. Capacity anchored by a top-tier tenant clears at infrastructure pricing, and everything else pays a risk premium somewhere in the cap table.

Because the warrants vest against purchase volume, the customer has a direct financial reason to take the later tranches, and Rum has a reason to make sure the campus is ready before the customer's option to walk away expires. The hedge cuts both ways, but the lost revenue if the third tranche never materializes sits on Rum's balance sheet.

Power is the reason the premium is concentrated in the tranche structure: the campus was planned for 120MW before expanding to 180MW, and it has to be live and connected before the third tranche can be approved. The customer gets to watch whether the interconnection arrives, whether the power shows up, and whether construction holds the schedule before committing the largest part of the $13.7bn, and the penny warrants are the price of that right of refusal.

Rum's financials put the size of the wager in context: revenue for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 was $40.36m, up from $25.08m a year earlier, but expenses rose to $111.15m from $51.7m, leaving a net loss of $79.144m attributable to Rum. Against that base, the $13.7bn lease is forward demand that has to be built, powered, and delivered.

Rum has already signed one AI tenant this year in Together AI, the company behind the 10,000-GPU buildout L&T is building in Chennai, a contract for dedicated cloud capacity built on Nvidia HGX B300 systems. The Maysville lease is the larger bet by an order of magnitude, and it is the first to put Rum's own campus at the center of the deal as the asset being delivered.

The third tranche, and with it the share register, is the number to watch. If the customer's purchases grow, the warrants vest and the counterparty becomes a shareholder; if the third tranche never gets approved, Rum is left with a smaller lease and a partially built campus financed by a balance sheet that lost $79.144m last quarter. The $13.7bn figure is a ceiling, and the warrants will show how much of that ceiling the customer actually believes is real. Watch whether the third tranche clears.